A timely and provocative discussion of alienation as an intersectional category of life under racial capitalism and white supremacy
 

From the divisiveness of the Trump era to the Covid-19 pandemic, alienation has become an all-too-familiar contemporary concept. In this groundbreaking book, James A. Tyner offers a novel framework for understanding the alienated subject, situating it within racial capitalism and white supremacy. Directly addressing current economic trends and their rhetoric of xenophobia, discrimination, and violence, The Alienated Subject exposes the universal whitewashing of alienation. 

Drawing insight from a variety of sources, including Marxism, feminism, existentialism, and critical race theory, Tyner develops a critique of both the liberal subject and the alienated subject. Through an engagement with the recent pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, he demonstrates how the alienated subject is capable of both compassion and cruelty; it is a sadomasochist. Tyner goes on to emphasize the importance of the particular places we find the alienated subject and how the revolutionary transformation of alienation is inherently a spatial struggle. Returning to key interlocutors from Sartre to Fromm, he examines political notions of distance and the spatial practices of everyday life as well as the capitalist conditions that give rise to the alienated subject.

For Tyner, the alienated subject is not the iconic, romanticized image of Marx’s proletariat. Here he calls for an affirmation of love as a revolutionary concept, necessary for the transformation of a society marred by capitalism into an emancipated, caring society conditioned by socially just relations.

James A. Tyner is professor of geography at Kent State University and a fellow of the American Association of Geographers. He is the author of several books, including War, Violence, and Population: Making the Body Count, winner of the AAG Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Work in Geography, as well as Dead Labor: Toward a Political Economy of Premature Death (Minnesota, 2019). 

"James A. Tyner hits hard on page one and never lets up. His passion for humanity is intense, his concern for the possibilities of humanity deep and penetrating, his disdain for the depths of wayward inhumanity unnerving, and his hope for a meaningful life for all humans compelling. His insightful and incisive analysis is a model of such hope. The world needs this book." —Audrey Kobayashi, Queen’s University— -